Couldn’t make BloombergNEF’s annual summit in New York? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Today’s newsletter has five takeaways from the first day.

Also, as energy experts try to piece together what caused this week’s massive blackout in Spain, Portugal, and parts of France, our Madrid-based reporter looks at how critics of renewables are already taking the opportunity to point the blame at the increasing supply of solar power. For unlimited access to climate and energy news, please subscribe. 

Five takeaways from the BNEF summit

By Mark Chediak, Josh Saul and Shoko Oda 

The threats to the global energy transition are numerous these days: Tariffs, market instability, policy uncertainty, the rise of artificial intelligence and geopolitical upheaval are just a few of the factors.

Yet despite the turbulence — brought on largely by US President Donald Trump’s trade policies and climate pullback — continued emissions cuts are still inevitable. That’s the message from the government officials, industry leaders and corporate executives at BloombergNEF’s annual summit in New York. 

Global investment in the energy transition has exceeded $2 trillion for the first time and clean energy is cost-competitive with coal and natural gas in most of the world, according to BNEF. The meeting took place against the backdrop of Spain’s massive blackout, underscoring the vulnerability of electric grids in the face of age, extreme weather and increasing demand. That will be increasingly important as more data centers come online. 

Here are five takeaways from the first day of the summit about how the world can continue its momentum — and the hazards that could derail it.

COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago at the BNEF Summit. Photographer: Ron Antonelli

Spain blackouts

The exact cause of the massive blackouts that hit Spain and Portugal on Monday is still unknown. But it’s the latest cascading grid failure, with the scale of the impacts mirroring what happened in Texas in 2021 and Puerto Rico in 2017.

COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago said the event showed that energy security shouldn’t be viewed in opposition to the energy transition.

“We cannot think it is one or the other,” said Corrêa do Lago, who is also Brazil’s secretary for climate and energy. “We need to have the transition happen and energy security is absolutely essential.” 

Adapting the energy system to more extreme weather is critical as billion-dollar disasters in the US have more than tripled since the 2000s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. However, there will be fewer US installations of grid-scale batteries — a key technology to backstop the grid — due to high tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, said BNEF Chief Executive Officer Jon Moore.

Trump turmoil

The tariffs are far from the only Trump troubles for clean energy. His administration has also rolled back support for green energy while boosting fossil fuels through a series of executive orders. 

The uncertainty has created an extremely challenging environment for long-term investment decisions, said Ara Partners’ co-founder Charles Cherington. “We are going to aggressively do nothing for the foreseeable future,” he said, quoting a colleague and drawing surprised gasps and whispers from the audience.

Andrew Gongaware, managing director at BMO, said he’s hearing from limited partners and other investors that there is now a “higher bar” for investing in the US with the recent policy changes.

“We face a very different landscape for energy financing than we did a few months ago,” said BNEF policy analyst Derrick Flakoll. 

The energy transition continues

The global transition toward electrification and clean energy will advance despite US political turmoil. BNEF projects that solar and wind deployments are forecast to increase fourfold and threefold respectively by 2035.

With the US pushing fossil fuels at home and abroad, there’s an opening for China to become the leading global voice of the energy transition.

“China is demonstrating an absolute conviction that it’s the right way to go to incorporate climate into their economic growth,” Corrêa do Lago said. “It’s because of their scale, their technology, their commitment to the dilemma. They have reduced the price of their solar panels in such a way that many African countries will be able to leapfrog to solar energy.”

Jigar Shah, former director of the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, said that while Trump loves to bash clean energy, his administration will be forced to come around if it wants to win the AI race and bring down the cost of energy.

“That’s going to cause a reckoning in the administration,” he said. “They cannot do it with fossil fuels alone. It’s going to require every available electron.”

Jigar Shah during the 2025 BNEF New York Summit. Photographer: Ron Antonelli

Nuclear and AI? 

At least some utilities share that view that all types of power are needed. To meet growing electricity demand, including from data centers, “we’ve got wind, solar and storage available right now, whereas gas turbines have a roughly five-year wait time and nuclear is at least a decade away to be deployed widely,” Xcel Energy CEO Bob Frenzel said.

Nuclear power will miss the first wave of data center demand, said BNEF analyst Chris Gadomski. Whether it plays a role keeping servers running beyond 2030 will depend on how much costs can come down, he added. Regulations could also slow down deployment.

In the meantime, natural gas is likely to feed the AI frenzy, said Daniel Droog, an executive in power solutions at Chevron. The oil giant recently struck a partnership with investor Engine No.1 and GE Vernova to develop natural gas plants next to data centers, he said. 

Industry optimism

A post-lunch panel searched for optimism and momentum in clean energy amid the Trump headwinds. There’s still going to be a lot of clean energy that gets built, with many projects already started or financed, said BMO’s Gongaware. 

The only question is just how much: “Are we going to see 100 gigawatts of new renewables over the next five years, or is it going to be 200?” he said. 

Apollo Global Management partner Corinne Still said the macro trends of rising power demand is a long-term tailwind and renewables are the cheapest and easiest to deploy forms of power generation. “We’ve always viewed ourselves as contrarian and so we seek to deploy capital even in time periods like this,” she said.

Data center surge

China's step change

Market snapshot

Chinese solar manufacturers continue to plunge deeper into the red, and the outlook is getting gloomier as sky-high tariffs on exports threaten to compound domestic oversupply.

Five of the biggest names in the industry — JA Solar Technology Co., Jinko Solar Co., Longi Green Energy Technology Co., Tongwei Co. and Trina Solar Co. — published first-quarter earnings overnight, racking up over 8 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) in losses between them. Their combined loss last year was less than 2 billion yuan, when two of the companies were still profitable.

By Laura Millan

Experts are at odds about the role that solar and wind played in Spain’s massive blackout this week.

Spain had reported an unprecedented number of hours with negative power prices in recent months, a fallout from insufficient storage capacity available to soak up increasing amounts of solar and wind supply.

Solar farms in particular inject large amounts of power into the grid during the day and go dark at night. While these swings can create instability for the grid, the variations haven’t previously caused blackouts in the country.

An unlit residential street during the power outage in Molins de Rei, Spain, on April 28. Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

For critics of renewables, the blackout represents an opportunity to go the attack. They’ve argued that limited fossil-fueled generation in Spain meant there was insufficient inertia to help maintain the grid’s frequency. But that ignores the other sources of stabilizing inertia available, including nuclear, hydro and solar thermal.

A lack of inertia was therefore not the main driver for the blackout, said Adam Bell, an energy consultant in the UK, but there are questions about the integrity of the grid in southwestern Spain, and whether enough solar farms were equipped with grid-forming inverters — devices that help control power frequency and stabilize power flowing into the grid. “We do not have a complete picture yet,” he said on Wednesday.

On Monday, just after noon and again about 15 minutes before the outage, the frequency of the grid started shifting unusually, indicating that the grid was under stress and needed to be stabilized, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Gridradar.

One clear lesson is that more investment is needed to ensure resilience of the system. More battery storage would have definitely helped as the technology could have responded “in a split second,” said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, an analyst with BloombergNEF.

Other European nations are watching closely, as they could face similar issues as the continent transition to clean energy to protect environment but also reduce dependencies on fossil fuel exporters.

“The massive blackout here in Spain and Portugal is a brutal reminder of the importance of security of supply,” Ebba Busch, Sweden’s energy minister, said in a post on social media. “Renewables and more grids alone will not build the strong power system that the EU needs for our security and our competitiveness.”

Read the full story — with details on how the blackout has added to Spain’s toxic politics — on Bloomberg.com. 

Seabed miner The Metals Company said Tuesday it has submitted an application for a US license to mine an area of the Pacific Ocean administered by a United Nations-affiliated organization. The move sets up a showdown between the Trump administration and international regulators over control of minerals critical to the energy transition.

Canadian-registered The Metals Company (TMC) said its US subsidiary has also filed two applications for US licenses to prospect for minerals in a vast stretch of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico under the jurisdiction of the 169-member-nation International Seabed Authority (ISA).

The region — known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) — contains some of the world’s largest estimated reserves of critical minerals for green technology in the form of polymetallic nodules, potato-sized rocks rich in copper, nickel, cobalt and manganese. Nodules, which are found by the billions at depths of 4,000 meters (13,000 feet), serve as habitat for about 50% of seabed species, most of which remain unknown to science but which researchers estimate can live hundreds or thousands of years.

Greenpeace activists confront workers on a boat conducting deep sea mining research for The Metals Company. Photographer: Martin Katz/Greenpeace

Britain has been warned against cuts to flood defense. The UK should spare flood defense programs from budget cuts to be announced in June, as the country is already woefully unprepared for worsening disasters linked to climate change, a government adviser has said.

The US is bearing the brunt of insured losses. In 2024, America accounted for almost 80% of the global total, with losses concentrated in Florida, Texas, California, Louisiana and Colorado. 

It’s possible to quantify climate damages by oil majors. A new paper published last week in the journal Nature demonstrated how to quantify the climate damages caused by each of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies. Those calculations could be brought as evidence in court.

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